Warren Ellis's Blog, page 74

STATION IDENT: Ryan Kelly

 

Thanks for this piece of loveliness go to Ryan Kelly, artist of Saucer Country from DC Vertigo and the free webcomic, Cocotte at http://cocottecomic.com/

Good morning, my little badgers of delight.

Drone Porn And The New Aesthetic Sleepbot

In an epic speculative post about commercial home-mapping services, Jan Chipchase drops this lovely idea bomb:

After seeing the nano-quadcopter presentation at TED 2012 – including this, but with a lot more background, insights into their capabilities, and a video of a quadcopter entering and mapping a building in real time – technically impressive stuff. First responders. Military. Pornographers. Research. Retail. This changes many things.

I think it might take me a while to fully digest this post by Matt Webb of BERG about products.  I have, for my entire career, staunchly fought against my work being called a product.  But there are a variety of lessons here, old and new – here's an old one, which easily applies to book/comics covers –

products have to be shelf demonstrable — they can tell their story in 15 seconds, with no interaction beyond looking.

– that I think will be very much worth my time to think about.

Young James Bridle here apparently quoted me at SXSW earlier today, according to the little flurry of @s on Twitter, including the mordant Bruce Sterling comment: "Now Bridle is quoting Warren Ellis. It's like a radically pixelated old home week in here."  He was doing a thing about The New Aesthetic, which I've mentioned here before.  (You can get a quick catch-up by checking out the New Aesthetic tumblr.)  He's now writing a fortnightly column for The Observer, and this link here should collect the pieces as they happen (first one's up right now).

 

(Also: Bruce did his own fairly brain-burning NA capture of the NA thing at SXSW.)

In a perhaps similar mode, and found via tecxnotes, I will close this with 2SLEEP1:

2SLEEP1 is a 66-minute playlist of audiovisual performances in text mode, designed to make you fall asleep.

It's the New Aesthetic Sleepbot.

HALF MOON: One Year Later

A year ago, Mike Avon Oeming and I started talking about a new comic.  And then we both got busy with other things.

We're still picking at it.  I need to rethink the middle sequence.  The thing kind of expanded beyond its original parameters.  But progress is happening, slowly.  Like this:

Previously:

HALF MOON With Mike Oeming: First Notes
HALF MOON: New Concept Art From Mike
HALF MOON: Zeroing In
HALF MOON: Kauai

Stuff Of The Month: ALL THE THINGS

A new bag, brought to you by Ariana, who is just as capable of accidentally revealing signs of deep-seated mental illness as I am.

It can be found, in various different forms, at our store of miscellaneous crap that we've been filling over the years.  We hope it at least makes you smile.

STATION IDENT: Back On The Air

Good morning, sinners.  Today's Station Ident, combined with a Three Panels I invited him to do last year, is by Will Kirkby, whose work in comics and illustration you can discover at his blog and at his online store.

logotone

Download audio file (WarrenEllisLogoTone.mp3)

Amazingly, someone did me a logotone. I really didn't think anyone would. Tonight's sound of warrenellis.com is brought to you by Irish experimental musician The Face Of Human Error.

This marks the beginning of returning this site to activity after two weeks off. Back in twelve hours.

Related articles

Spektrmodule 08 (warrenellis.com)
Who I Am And Where I Am (Jan 2012) (warrenellis.com)

Bookmarks for 2012-03-11

We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction – Ross Andersen – Technology – The Atlantic
"…suppose you have a moral view that counts future people as being worth as much as present people…"
(tags:future dooooom )

SPEKTRMODULE 08

SPEKTRMODULE
08
Death Is No Obstacle
42 minutes and 44 seconds

 

 

Direct mp3 link.  Press Play on the player then find the menu button in the bottom left for other functions.  iTunes link.

@warrenellis / warrenellis@gmail.com / merch

1.  logotone

2.  "Pro Victoria" -  VNV Nation   (album: Of Faith, Power And Glory)

3.  "The Cause Of Labour Is The Hope Of The World" – Jóhann Jóhannsson   (album: The Miners' Hymns)

4.  Hello.

5.  "Birds Inspire Epic Bards" -  Fursaxa    (album: Alone In The Dark Wood)

6.  "Heir Looms" -  Imbogodom   (album:  And They Turned Not When They Went)

7.  Me again.  I record all these pieces on my phone.

8.  "Requiem For The Static King Part One" -  A Winged Victory For The Sullen  (album: A Winged Victory For The Sullen)

9.  "Space Cradle" – First Human Ferro   (album: Homo Shargey)

10.  Me again.

11.  "V: Vhinto No Dresce" -  EUS   (album:  Vhinto No Dresce)

12.  "A Prayer" -  Echthros   (album: Iyov)

13.  Me again.

14.  "Kuda Lumping trance dance" – Unknown Artist   (album:  Street Musicians of Yogyakarta)

15.  "Freeflow" – Blues Control & Laraaji   (album: FRKWYS Vol. 8: Blues Control & Laraaji)

16.  logotone

PREVIOUSLY: 1 – Fire Axes In Space | 2 – The Lane | 3 – Comfort And Joy | 4 – Long Count | 5 – Underfoot | 6 – The Chamber | 7 – Spark Gap

On Pause

For many reasons (work-related, health-related, burying-more-pets-related, just-bloody-tiredness-related), I just haven't been able to get going with warrenellis.com so far this year.  So I'm switching the site to Pause for a couple of weeks.  Normal service will resume with a new episode of SPEKTRMODULE on March 9 or thereabouts.

In the meantime, I want to leave these things here:

 

Last year, I did a thing for people who make comics called Three Panels Open.  Literally, a three-panel comic.  The only rules were that it had to be legible at a width of 640 pixels, which is the width of the content bar on this site, and that it had to be three panels long.

Perhaps you'd like to do a three-panel comic to be posted here.  If so, email the image to warrenellis@gmail.com, and please include your name and the website and/or twitter account you'd like it to be associated with.  Same rules apply: three panels, and it can't turn to mud when I run it at 640px.  The ones I like best will be run here from March 10 – 31.

Also, I'm opening up the GUEST INFORMANT skein to submissions, after a fashion.  If you're working in the arts and sciences and you'd like to talk at my readership here about your work or something related to it, drop me a note at warrenellis@gmail.com about what you're in the mood to write and we'll sort something out.  You can see all the other Guest Informants at this link.  They include novelists, journalists, musicians, data griots, researchers, artists, designers, futurists and nuclear physicists.  (Some of those posts are huge.  I tell people, "I'd be happy with two hundred words!")  As you'll see, each Informant post can come with links to whatever you've got going on.

Also also, I really think that the Station Ident should come back, and that the top of each week should have a logotone.  By "really think" I actually mean "literally just thought of this and laughed because it sounded like fun." 

The Station Ident is a photo or other image and the words "this is warren ellis dot com."  Something arty, something filthy, something strange, something funny: don't care, so long as it's original to you. Snapshot or illustration, Photoshop or fansign; don't care, so long as it has the following words in it somewhere:

"this is warren ellis dot com"

Email it as an attachment to warrenellis@gmail.com, my public dump email address, if you feel like playing. Please include your name and a website if you have one, or plug a work of yours if applicable. Ideally, it'd be 640 px across, but I can resize stuff. And I'll use all the ones I like, eventually.

(I might even bring back the Closedown, or amalgamate it with Night Music.  I'm old enough to remember closedowns.  Also, the last ice age.)

And… that's it.  Now I need to get into some development work and serious thinking.  See you in a couple of weeks.  Be good. 

The Belbury Tales

Out today on CD, LP, mp3 and FLAC. I just bought the mp3 download directly from them. Because I do like a bit of Belbury Poly, me (not that my fondness for all things Ghost Box is a secret). Today's a good day for some spectral time travel.

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